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Overstock learns that .com is still king

The rise of the .com domain name culminated in the sale of Business.com for $7.5m in 1999.

After the .com bust, the pace of multi-million dollar domain name sales slowed, although more than a few domains have changed hands for seven figures in the past decade.

But despite the fact that there has been a vibrant trade in domain names
amongst investors, speculators and businesses, many have come to
question whether a great .com domain is really even necessary on today’s
internet.

To be sure, there’s plenty of reason to question whether spending
hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars on the perfect .com is good idea. Super-popular online services with names like Twitter
prove that you don’t need a generic brand to succeed, and companies like
bit.ly demonstrate that you can build a service used by millions of
people around previously-uncommon ccTLDs.

The online retailer was one of the most prominent adopters of the .co
ccTLD. .co, of course, is the ccTLD for Colombia, but many domain name
registrars have been pushing it hard since its ‘relaunch‘ last year. And
it’s not hard to understand why: .co is .com without the ‘m‘. So it
must be at least two-thirds as good as .com, right?

Not quite. After trying to rebrand itself as O.co, Overstock.com has
decided to revert back to Overstock.com, “for now.” Insisting that
“We’re still focused on getting to O.co,” Overstock.com President
Jonathon Johnson admitted to AdAge, “We were going too fast and people
were confused“.

The cost of “going too fast“: after featuring O.co in television ads,
updating its website and even changing the signage on a sports stadium
it owns the naming rights to, Overstock.com found that many were going
to o.com, not o.co. That was an obvious problem because Overstock.com
doesn’t own o.com.

The fact that a good number of consumers didn’t get the .co branding
probably isn’t that surprising to most of us, but even so,
Overstock.com’s blunder serves as a powerful reminder: if it isn’t
broken, don’t try to fix it. When it comes to domain names, it’s hard to
go wrong with .com.

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